A Proud Defender of Capitalism and Freedom

Budget arithmetic is incredibly simple: Budget Surplus (Deficit) = Tax Revenue – Spending From this equation, it seems perfectly reasonable that increasing tax revenue would be a sensible solution to eliminating the deficit, but the reality is that the level of tax revenue is completely irrelevant! How could this be? Let’s look at some budget […]

One pet peeve of mine is the use of sloppy language, and I can think of no better example than the phrase “tax cut.” Does it mean a tax rate cut? A tax base cut? A tax revenue cut? It’s ambiguous. “Tax cut” is most often used to mean a tax rate cut, which we […]

You can learn a lot about a person’s beliefs by the language that they use. For example, Democrats denounce tax cuts as “a giveaway to the rich” over and over again. What is the underlying belief that this phrase betrays? A tax cut allows someone to keep more of their own money, but Democrats don’t […]

Paul Krugman and many others on the left have claimed that “austerity” policies are the reason for the stagnant recovery from the recession that occurred from December 2007 through June 2009. One can only wonder how they can be so delusional as to call U.S. fiscal policy “austerity.” You keep using that word. I do […]

Macroeconomic issues dominate the news and political discourse, but it is all bullshit. What is macroeconomics? It is the study of an economic system as a whole. This is in contrast to microeconomics, which studies individual components of the economy, such as an individual, a household, or a business. Macroeconomics essentially tries to understand the […]

One of the biggest developments holding back human progress in the last century is probably a surprising one. We are hamstrung by our ability to collect macroeconomic and other demographic data. This development started in earnest in the 1930s (mostly as a result of trying to understand the Great Depression) and accelerated with the development […]

One important issue that so many people fail to recognize is that a person can dislike certain aspects of society while believing strongly that it’s not the government’s job to try to fix it. For example, I obviously don’t like poverty, but I also don’t think it’s the government’s job to eliminate it. My viewpoint […]

It’s a tough time for lovers of freedom. Barack Obama’s reelection was a clear sign that we are going to continue on “the road to serfdom.” Over the last century or so, government has been continually encroaching on our liberty by slowly but consistently increasing taxes and government spending, as well as issuing laws and […]